As a newbie in the world of entrepreneurs, digital marketing can be a scary maze to navigate. Without the foundation knowledge about this niche, you can fast find yourself spiraling into a state of confusion.
Or, perhaps you’re not an entrepreneurial newbie. Maybe you’ve been in the market long enough but have not explored the digital arm of your business and are ready to join in now. You need a rundown of digital marketing to function expertly in this industry.
To make the most of digital marketing, an excellent place to start is the basics. You can also look into reviewing strategies that digital marketing leaders have employed that yielded tangible results.
Doing this helps you better understand the scope of digital marketing and all you need to know about it. Let’s start at the very beginning.
What is digital marketing?
There’s the traditional style of marketing, and then there is digital marketing.
Traditional marketing involves promoting your goods and services via traditional media including, print, mail, billboard adverts, television, and other strategies. While this marketing method is excellent in reaching a local audience, digital marketing takes you global, expanding your reach.
Digital marketing brings all the effort of a traditional marketer to the digital world and then improves on them. It is simply any form of marketing done on any electronic device except a TV. To measure the impact of this marketing style, you also conduct the analysis digitally.
Digital marketing is also known as online marketing. It is any strategy through which you identify, build and promote your business or brand to an audience through the internet or other digital means of communication.
The end goal is to spur the audience into paying for your goods and services and possibly retain their customership.
The main focus of marketing is to connect with your audience wherever they exist. Digital marketing exists on different platforms and in different ways to accommodate the various buyers who need to access these services.
One of the most popular types of digital marketing is email marketing. Just like the traditional marketing strategy that uses direct mail, digital marketing employs email marketing to contact the buyers directly through their digital inbox.
There’s also social media marketing. Millions of internet users exist on at least one social media platform. Through social media marketing, you can make the most of that large audience base and reach potential clients interested in your offerings.
Why is digital marketing important to entrepreneurs?
Offline marketing isn’t like it once was. People’s shopping behaviors have changed with the convenience and ease that online shopping gives. More and more people are buying into the comfort of shopping from home, ordering services from home, even booking appointments from their couch.
Digital marketing addresses all these growing needs of internet users, who make up a large percentage of your customer base.
Check out these statistics:
87% of internet users now own smartphones, and nine more people purchase one every second. 81% of Americans go online daily. By 2023, America is expected to have about 91% of the population shopping online.
Since 2014, digital marketing has made up 75% of the marketing budget. Big numbers!
All of this shows how important it is to fully understand and employ digital marketing strategies for your business in today’s world.
- Digital marketing helps you reach a broader range of clients without spending as much as you would for traditional marketing strategies.
- Digital marketing defies location barriers. Your digital marketing platform can reach anywhere in the digital space without location restrictions.
- It’s easy to design personalized campaigns that attract your different customer persona based on the data you can collect from them. However, it is essential to remember to collect customers’ data in compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act to remain on the Law’s side.
- Through digital marketing, you can relate with clients in real-time and solve their challenges on the go, keeping you relevant and necessary to them. Through the on-the-go interactivity, you can also deduce what’s essential to your clients to help you serve them better.
7 Vital digital marketing tips for every entrepreneur
Your digital marketing strategies detail how you set your business apart in the teeming populace of the digital world. Check out our secrets to helping you stay relevant and fast-growing in the digital marketing world.
1. Identify and create a buyer persona
There are two main aspects of marketing; the target audience and your business. To yield better results, you have to ensure that your marketing strategies are being focused on the right audience.
To identify who the right audience is, you need to create a buyer persona. This is one of the first and most essential steps to honing the digital marketing space. Your buyer persona is the ideal customer or client that your business intends to cater to.
So, ask yourself: Who does my product or services serve? What are the needs I’m seeking to solve, and who will benefit from it the most? What age-grade am I looking to address? In what location? What are their interests? What social media can I find them? How much will they be willing to spend on my product or service conveniently?
You can quickly source this information from credible analytical sites like Google Analytics or Facebook Audience Insights. Your competition is also a valid haven of data to generate your buyer persona.
2. Create engaging content
After you have identified your buyer persona, staying relevant to them is also necessary. To do this, you have to feed them with content that will keep them glued to you. Relevant and engaging content is one of the mainstays of digital marketing.
As a digital marketer, get familiar with creating SEO-friendly content. Content can come in different forms. Social media posts: Videos, photos, infographics; blog posts, email marketing campaigns, etc.
As you create your content, ensure that it is relatable to your audience and practical for the platform where you will share it. It should also be engaging because the purpose is to generate leads and increase brand awareness.
3. Convert audio marketing campaigns to text for a wider reach
Different audiences are more comfortable with different types of media. One audience may prefer photo content; some others may like to read your content on the bus, on their way to work. Others may choose to listen during their morning run.
By converting your audio to text, you save yourself the challenge of creating entirely new content to fit every category. Your audio content can still be effective for text-lovers when you have converted the audio file. It helps you save time and reduces the pressure of creating different content.
4. Make the most of your customer data
Businesses, whether small or large, always have data to keep track of. As a digital marketing entrepreneur, what’s important is knowing how to use this data to benefit the business.
Use data tracking and monitoring tools like SEMrush or Google Analytics to track key information such as your customers’ buying preferences and purchase patterns.
Information like this is helpful for email marketing campaigns as you can create targeted, personalized content highlighting the users’ likes based on their purchase history. This can significantly cause a boost in lead generation.
5. Interact with your audience using live engagement
Many customers are looking for answers to their challenges or problems, and they need these answers in-the-moment. A company or brand that can provide these answers for them will remain at the fore of their mind.
With live engagement tools, you can engage with your clients on-the-go so that you can provide solutions to their problems when they need it no more waiting long hours on the phone to speak to a customer service representative.
You can now set up live chats on your website or digital platform to improve your customer experience. Through live chat software like Whisbi, you can keep your clients engaged and informed or convert more leads to sales.
6. Convert leads with video content
When it comes to video content, it’s a different ballgame. If you do it right, the statistics point to a higher conversion rate. A report by MarTech says that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase after seeing a detailed video of the product.
What makes video content so great? Videos are engaging; well-done, quality videos can hold an audience’s attention for up to two minutes.
There are different types of video content you can make the most of. Explainer videos, DIY videos, behind-the-scene videos, are all video content your audience will love.
Make sure the video you create is well-suited for your audience type. Check out your competition; how have they used video content to draw their audience? Try out their strategy while adding your unique touch.
7. Optimize for SEO
As a beginner to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you begin by checking how visible your content is on search engines like Google. If you haven’t optimized your content for visibility, carry out keyword research.
Find the most searched words in your industry by using keyword search tools like Moz. Carrying out keyword research helps you identify what clients in your niche are looking for to tailor your content to fit their search.
When your potential customers search for related products or services, your business can make the top searches.
Optimizing for local searches is also essential. Ensure you put up your business on local listings online to help your target audience in your area locate you more easily.
Conclusion
Digital marketing has many divisions that cannot be entirely explored in one sitting. Even further, the world of digital marketing evolves daily with new marketing trends and strategies popping up.
Internet users’ needs change frequently; an excellent digital marketing entrepreneur observes the market and adjusts their strategies to suit their needs. The tips we’ve shared in this article will help you stay ahead of the game.